no-such-address

Funny article.

"The exact master copy that the artist recorded and wanted for us to hear" In the digital era, does that even, uniquely, exist?

"a set of standards created by a bunch of engineers in 1993" Nice!

Was hoping the article would mention double blind studies about the ability to perceive differences and the quality between various audio file format, available elsewhere. Interesting, though not as overwrought as the reporting in this article.

We moved to https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/

There were 8 merge requests and 3 commits in the last 24 hours.

It's so awful, maybe it's a troll.

It sounds as if the hiring managers got cold feet and made an emotional or impulsive decision. It's not surprising they could feel bad for treating a candidate that way, for indescribable reasons. It's not as if the justification offered was, "We lost our budget and couldn't go through with our offer" or "We have another much more highly qualified candidate and the organization needs that person." Managers that interact with candidates should be decent enough to anticipate the possibility of not going through with an offer and create sufficient emotional buffering to leave people with their self-respect, or give the candidate more useful clues about how they're really doing. There are many ways hiring managers can increase their skill at this difficult work. I will never forget, I made someone cry in an interview once. You can ask hard questions but we all have to decide if this is the kind of human being we want to be.

Yes, they are there all day, until closing time, or longer. Usually, the longer you stay, the more likely you are to buy their car, or give them more money. They control the situation and the incentives are in their favor. This is one reason we loathe car shopping.

Wasn't DEK giving a talk entitled, "The Letter S" in connection with the invention of Metafont? Nothing but admiration!

Something else to know is that Ticketmaster is happy to list and collect commissions from 3rd party ticket sales, but they excuse themselves from "Ticketmaster Fan Support" policies. Caveat emptor.

Yes, there is so much potential to integrate diagramming and recent work on constraint solvers including SAT solvers, but also very difficult to make such systems usable and convenient. There is a lot of hackery in graphviz that seems difficult to recreate in a general context. It would help if graphviz could be brought up to date or moved to a better environment for doing new work.

This is incredible. I think I needed this about 40 years when typing on a small Teletype (non-ASR33) without an escape key.

The information and know-how in this talk is amazing.

It would be interesting to know the author's thoughts about other early influential software in the early PC era, such as the UCSD P-system (was UCSD Pascal an early version of Turbo Pascal?) and Microsoft Basic (fitting the whole interpreter, including floating point arithmetic emulation into 6.5K of RAM on an Intel 8080 seems like a minor miracle today.)

Ha ha very funny. Yes, just try a lot of other distros until you find one that works, maybe.

It was a beautiful dream, but one can't be both an outsider and an insider.

When you say sustainable, do you mean, is it possible to train another generation of engineers to take over the maintenance and development of the software?

I wonder about software that has a secondary or supporting role in the ecosystem. Working on them does not provide the level of career opportunities that seem to be available from working on core distributed computing or machine learning platforms. Apparently the default is that they will be abandoned in place.

Can you explain further? I tend to agree because the claim that "graph databases are good for highly connected data" seems funny - can't relational databases be "highly connected" in the same way? Isn't it really about query languages or maybe writing expressive schemas? I don't see how claims about efficiency stand up to an objective critique.

Or that it's so hard to do well enough to be useful, that hardly anyone can, except possibly Google, as a special case.

Is this actually a surprise to anyone? Year 1: here's an extra x% of your salary! Aren't you happy! Year 2: here's the same x%! Aren't you just as happy.

Compare this with getting a raise.

This is a good trend. Will we see more work aimed at separating the data model and human interface (to make programming with attributed graphs safe and convenient) from back end issues (how to store data and process queries efficiently, where traditional databases are already very advanced.)

At the dawn of the "home computer" phenomenon, there was a great deal of optimism computer literacy for the public would include a much richer understanding programming. It's too bad that didn't work out. It doesn't seem fair to blame any specific language or environment because they're all still readily available. It's just that there's so much you need to know, now, to do significant work. I wonder if there's any way to improve this situation. A lot of effort was already expended in this direction.

Why not ask Apple to replace the battery and see if that helps?

Your criticisms of my comment are fair, but you are also defending an animation of hot air balloon that somehow describe attributes of cryptocurrency transactions.

There's nothing wrong about making visualizations that look interesting and appealing, but do the most salient features of this display actually encode the data? Or was it designed mostly to convey a subjective view about Bitcoin?

Didn't Tufte call designs like this building a "Duck"? https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

Visualizing: You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. VIS guy

From comments here, you can see the field of premium photography equipment is about to undergo some kind of massive disruptive consolidation and reorganization. Almost anyone who comments here is a prospective customer, yet we see so much fragmentation. Some customers just ask for a box with a great sensor, and plan to process the images elsewhere. Some ask for a retro-experience, or an open source photography platform, or an incremental improvement to existing products. Some ask for a high-end consumer experience like a Smartphone, or tighter smartphone integration. Maybe a smart equipment company would organize its products around those markets, instead of struggling to segment too finely using old concepts of cost and performance.

The traditional photography equipment business is in a world of trouble because, as others point out, software is replacing physics as well as the familiar mechanical human interface. This requires a lot of expensive software engineers and some computer science expertise, and the rate of change is only increasing now. For example consider how machine learning is affecting image processing, like this method of pixel-based image synthesis: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aayushb/pixelNN/. Having lost the low end, DSLR companies can't amortize the cost of ambitious engineering projects over any significant volume of inexpensive products. Agree with the article by Thom Hogan - if anything it doesn't go far enough to convey the extent to which top line camera companies are out of touch with how the digital world has changed.